


Bogeyman

by foolish_mortal



Series: Hannibal SGA tropes [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, DADT, M/M, Stargate
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-24 13:18:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2582795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolish_mortal/pseuds/foolish_mortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A monster is running loose through people's nightmares, Will Graham is not good with feelings, and everyone is obsessed with Dr. Lecter's plastic suit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bogeyman

**Author's Note:**

> Based on Stargate Atlantis 4.04 "Doppelganger": After coming across a crystalline species, Lt. Colonel John Sheppard inadvertently carries its entity back to Atlantis. As it moves into other members, it's bent on destroying them in nightmares in the form of Sheppard.
> 
> Happy belated Hanni-ween!

"We've only been on this planet for an hour," Price argues. It's been pouring rain since they came through the gate. His greying hair is flattened against his skull. "Concluding that it doesn't contain life isn't just reckless, I think it's a little narcissistic."

"There's nothing about this place in the Ancient database," Zeller argues. He splashes into a puddle, sending mud all over Will's shins. "Don't you think they would have documented any traces of civilization?"

Price is adamant. "It's been thousands of years since the Ancients left this galaxy. Who's to say a little planetary displacement didn't bring some people here?"

"Do you have a bet riding on this?" Zeller asks suspiciously.

"Enough!" Lass snaps. One of her fingers is on her P90. There are twigs in her ponytail. "Graham, stay with the Odd Couple. I'm asking Dr. Lecter if we can head back."

"But you can't–" Price starts.

"How will we know–" Zeller interrupts.

Lass ignores them and stomps over to where Hannibal is standing perfectly attired in BDUs and a clear plastic shell that feels like cotton and repels water like Teflon. It's an experimental material his department is working on. Dr. Katz says it looks like a condom.

"What do you think, doctor?" Lass calls out. "Should we call this one off?"

Hannibal's expression is carefully neutral as he replies, "Perhaps Dr. Price was overenthusiastic when adding this planet to our roster."

Price definitely lost a bet, Will thinks as he watches Price's crestfallen face. Lass wipes her face, spits, and readjusts her gun against her body. "I'm calling this one," she says. "Back to the gate."

The tree behind Hannibal suddenly bursts into points of iridescent brilliance. Everyone recoils except for Price, who surges forward with a life signs detector.

"Yeah, baby! This is the energy signature I've been picking up!" he says and waves the detector in front of what looks like a glowing crystalline mass protruding from a tree trunk. "Hi there, little guy."

Lass has her gun trained in front of her. "Graham?"

Will shakes his head. "It's not me. It doesn't feel Ancient. Whatever that is, I didn't activate it."

Zeller squints his eyes against the light and tries to get a better look. "The Ancients definitely didn't write about this."

"Maybe it's a new life form. Who is to say this isn't the civilization we've been looking for?" Price crows.

"Are you suggesting that crystals migrate?" Zeller inquires and gets an elbow in the side for his troubles.

"Fascinating." Hannibal is staring at the crystals with undisguised interest. He reaches out a hand. "It seems they're growing directly from the bark. If we manage to cultivate these, we may be able to produce our own control crystals."

"Wait, what the hell are you doing?" Zeller demands, and then Hannibal shoots backward in a shower of light. He lands on his back a few feet away, his head lolling to one side.

"Hannibal!" Will shouts and runs to him.

Lass crouches down next to Will in the mud. "Dr. Lecter, are you alright?"

"You killed it!" Price and Zeller complain, waving at the darkened crystals.

Hannibal's eyes open and focus on Will. His pupils are steady. "Will," he says, his voice dazed. Will and Lass help him up between them. The back of Hannibal's head is matted with dirt and breaks off in clumps when Will brushes it away. The hair underneath is soft and damp.

"Why did you touch the crystal?" Price demands. "You're the first person that should know about proper scientific procedure."

Hannibal shakes his head as if to clear it. He looks perfectly composed again, but he leans heavily against Will's side. Will holds him a little tighter. "I apologize. I felt compelled to touch it. I can't say why."

Lass juts out her chin and surveys the dead crystal. "We'll send a science team back to inspect these things. In the meantime, we circle back to the gate, and Dr. Lecter will report to the infirmary for a follow-up."

"We are a science team!" Zeller says, gesturing between Price and himself.

"I believe I am quite alright, Major Lass," Hannibal adds.

"What is this, sass the Lass day? I said, move out," Lass snaps and herds them away from the crystalline growths. Hannibal unslings his arm from Will's shoulder with a murmur of thanks and trudges on with Price and Zeller, leaving Will to bring up their six.

Will sighs and unholsters his gun as he follows. The last three missions have been disgusting or pointless or dull. Who knows when one of the unmarked planets in the Ancient database will yield something interesting. Will decides to focus instead on the hot shower waiting for him on Atlantis and the reparations Price will undoubtedly make from winning his bet with whatever personnel from the astrophysics department tried to send him on a fool's errand.

 --

The new polyfilm skin is holding up better than the last, Dr. Abel Gideon observes with pride and cuts out a neat sample strip for processing in the morning. They're really quite lucky that Dr. Lecter volunteers to wear it in the field. No one has the guts to tell him that he looks like a nerd.

"Dr. Gideon," Lecter says from behind him, as if scenting insults like a shark on the water. Abel jumps and almost cuts himself on his Xacto knife.

"Hi, Dr. Lecter. Shouldn't you be resting?" Abel folds up the rest of the suit and seals it in an airtight bag. "Heard you were in the infirmary after your recent offworld mission."

"No residual effects," Lecter assures him and slides a tall lidded bowl across the workbench. The momentum crushes delicate leafy stalks and fresh spices against the glass. "It seems I've made too much dinner, and I dislike leftovers. I thought perhaps you would enjoy it."

Abel is immediately suspicious. Lecter doesn't ever admit his mistakes, and he isn't especially fond of any of his colleagues. But then his stomach growls, reminding him that he missed dinner at the mess.

Steam rushes out of the container when Abel opens it, revealing thin layers of overlapping meat and florets of broccoli. Lecter's garden on the abandoned northwest pier is flourishing, Abel notes and accepts the fork that Lecter oh-so-helpfully offers.

"Thank you. This looks delicious." Abel scoops a piece of meat and sauce into his mouth. Flavor bursts across Abel's tongue – spices and fruit. The heady strength of reduced Athosian wine. Abel makes a noise of appreciation and eats with gusto.

When he looks up, Lecter is watching him with unsettling intensity. Abel swallows and feels the next bite stick in his throat. "What about your usual Friday night dinner with Lieutenant Graham?" he asks.

"Will Graham is indisposed," Lecter says so serenely that Abel knows he's disappointed.

"Huh." Abel hopes Lecter and Graham aren't fighting. If those two can't make it work, there's no hope for the rest of them.

Not that there's anything to tell yet, as far as Abel knows, and no one is asking. It would be a shame to lose Lieutenant Graham to one of the U.S. government's more draconian laws, not in the least because it means they would probably lose Lecter too. He hopes one of them makes a move soon so that Lecter can get laid sometime this century and finally chill out.

"This is great," he says instead. "Graham is missing out. What's in it?"

Lecter raises a carving knife and fork. "Just a little taste of home, doctor."

"What?" The cold metal workbench is hard against Abel's back. His leg is upraised and braced with a clamp. Layers of flesh are carved away from the calf muscle, and Abel can see the bone underneath.

Lecter adjusts the sleeves of his plastic suit as he pins the skin securely with the fork and begins cutting into the flesh. No, not flesh. _Meat._

Abel struggles against the zip ties binding his arms. "Stop! What are you doing? _Stop!_ "

Lecter ignores him. The blade saws expertly through skin and muscle. There's so much blood. _There's so much blood._

Abel jerks out of his chair, gasping, and wheels around the empty material science lab. The polyfilm suit is lying on the table in front of him, a bead of drool visible on one of the sleeves. Abel's Xacto knife is exactly where he must have abandoned it as he dropped off to sleep. The blade gleams under the lamp light.

Abel shudders and caps the knife before putting it away.

 --

Somewhere along the course of the expedition, Beverly Katz has given herself the impression that she and Will are friends. She tells Will it's because of all the quality time he and his team often spend in her infirmary, but Will thinks it's because she enjoys watching him squirm.

Katz's lunch tray slams down with enough force to make Will fumble with the dog-eared copy of Tedeschi that he's been reading since the start of the expedition.

"Hiya," Katz says cheerfully, much too cheerfully for someone who was in surgery for ten hours last week to remove an exploding tumor from Dr. Buddish's brain. Sometimes Will really hates the Pegasus Galaxy.

Will marks his place as he shuts the book. "I thought you were on shift."

"Pawned it off on Frankyn. Are you ever going to finish that?" Katz takes a long languorous gulp of chocolate milk. "You've been on page thirty for forever."

"It's a new edition."

"Wow," Katz says with exaggerated respect and rewards him with a shapeless dollop of the alien ciambotta that the mess has been serving every week since Commander Du Maurier signed a trading agreement with the farming commune on P3X-220.

"Just what I wanted," Will says drily and sticks a fork in the ciambotta. They both watch as the utensil stays standing and then oozes slowly sideways.

"Ew," Katz says with all the sympathy of someone who has foisted her problem onto someone else. And then, magnanimously, "I'll get you a fruit cup from the infirmary later."

"Stop doing people favors, Katz." Zeller slides in beside her and gives Will a curt nod. "Graham."

"Dr. Zeller," Will replies, and then Zeller goes back to pretending Will doesn't exist.

Zeller has never made a secret about hating Will. Zeller was the strongest gene carrier at the SGC until Will sat in a chair in Antarctica and opened up the universe for them, and Zeller's nursed an inferiority complex over the incident ever since. It doesn't help that Zeller was the one who lost control of the rogue drone that almost killed Colonel Crawford.

The city life signs detector twinges as Abel Gideon from the material science division walks into the mess. The feedback echoes like a vicious flick to Will's brain, and sticks a finger in his ear to dispel the static. He makes a mental note to debug the city sensors later.

Gideon pauses for a perfunctory flirtation with the new SGC psychiatrist and then makes a beeline for their table. He's wearing his usual charming smile, but there are dark circles under his eyes. "Hello, Dr. Katz. I appreciate your assistance yesterday night."

"No problem." Katz aims finger guns at him. "Glad I was Abel to help."

"Jesus Christ." Zeller mimes giving himself a tracheotomy with his spoon.

Gideon laughs tonelessly, and it doesn't reach his eyes. "I was actually hoping you could expedite my request for materials disposal to the medical incinerator. I understand we overtaxed it after the, ah…"

"Golf-ball sized exploding tumors," Zeller supplies.

"…recent unfortunate incident, but I'm anxious to get rid of the sample."

"Graham's your man, doc." Katz jabs a thumb towards him. "What do you say, Obi-Wan? You think Mom can reallocate the power supply to put some juice in the oven?"

Will chews a bite of food slowly and thinks about it. He sends a quick blip to the city, who replies with a row of diagnostics. He does some quick edits to the load balancing algorithms and gets a confirmation back.

"Should be fine as long as we take it off the power grid later," he says, and then, "Did you just call the city 'Mom'?"

"Does she prefer Mothership?" Katz teases. "What are you getting rid of, anyway?"

Gideon winces. "There's ah…there's a problem with one of Dr. Lecter's polyfilm suits."

Katz lets out a bark of laughter. Even Zeller smiles. "You bet there is – they're the ugliest things I've ever seen, and I've dissected Iratus bugs. Thank god you're burning it. You should burn all of them."

"The science team puts long hours of hard work into producing those suits." In his sudden professional indignation, Gideon forgets to be afraid. "They'll be part of the field kit someday. They're the future."

Gideon's lying, Will thinks, but not about the suit, not precisely. Something's rubbed his nerves raw, something that made him seek out the infirmary yesterday.

"Where is Hannibal?" Will asks. Gideon blanches at the question. "I thought Du Maurier put him on light active duty after the mission."

"Dr. Lecter keeps his own timetable." Gideon's tone is evasive. "I haven't seen him since yesterday in the lab."

"Lecter was in the isolation ward yesterday," Katz corrects him. "I had him under observation overnight."

"Yes, of course," Gideon replies. "I meant the day before. Excuse me, I need my lunch."

Katz pushes out the empty chair beside Will with her foot. "Come sit with us. It's pot roast day."

Gideon blanches again. "Thank you very much," he says and then disappears out the doors, not giving the mess a second glance.

"What a weirdo," Katz says affectionately, but her eyes are contemplative, and Will is reminded that despite all of her jokes, Beverly Katz is one of the most brilliant doctors in the SGC. They're all on edge in their campaign against the Wraith. Will supposes the infirmary must be handing out sleeping pills and chemical stimulants like candy. No wonder Katz looks apprehensive.

"Why's he's burning the suit?" Zeller interrupts Katz's reverie. "I thought they made the polyfilm sterile and antimicrobic."

"They also made it anti-personnel," Katz jokes. "I'm surprised anyone talks to him while he's wearing it. He looks like a space burrito."

"It's a shower curtain," Zeller quips.

"It's like American Psycho meets American Gothic."

"He looks like he's been recently dry cleaned."

"Why is everyone so obsessed with Hannibal's plastic suit?" Will grumbles. He really wants to finish his book in peace, and the rushing static in his ear, which was beginning to recede after Gideon left, is coming back strong.

"He looks pretty cute in it," Katz says coyly. "Wouldn't you say he looks _cute_ , Graham?"

"I would say he looks like a total – oh shit, that burns!" Zeller yelps as Katz accidentally spills a spoonful of soup into his lap.

Will swallows a smile. The suit's gone through several iterations since the project first started: elastic cuffs, French cuffs, balaclava, buttoned collar. The word 'endearing' has no business anywhere near sober precise Dr. Lecter, but that's the first word that springs to Will's mind. He doesn't say it out loud.

"The science team does prioritize function over aesthetic," he admits.

Katz brays with laughter. "If this were real life, they would be asked to pack up their stations and exit the runway."

"This isn't real life?" Will asks, perplexed.

"What runway?" Zeller demands.

Katz sighs, a deeply aggrieved and persecuted sound.

 --

The most important skill medical school teaches its students is opportunistic sleep—or, as Jimmy Price calls it, shark sleeping. Beverly Katz can drop off in the most uncomfortable places and go from full REM to fighting form in under three seconds. On Atlantis, that's almost as valuable skill as her pathological experience with xenogenic diseases.

So when she's woken up in the middle of the night by the city-wide comm that's ordering her to the infirmary, Beverly is out of bed and moving before her eyes have even finished opening. She screws her radio into her ear and starts relaying orders to the medical staff to be on standby as she shoves her bare feet into her boots.

The infirmary is dark and cold and empty. Beverly briskly runs her hands up and down her goosepimpling arms and wishes she'd thrown a jacket over her pyjamas. The engineering team must be fucking with the power grid again. Life support and auxillary power are still engaged – the scrubbers hum overhead and LEDs wink intermittently from a plugged in EKG machine at the foot of an infirmary bed. Hannibal Lecter's name is scrawled on the chart.

"Godammit," Beverly swears, and her mind reaches back to the beginning of the day, talking to Gideon, Lecter's prolonged unexplained absence, needling Will Graham about his repressed guilty crush.

Oh shit, Graham is going to flip out. Beverly's read the data bursts about the chaos and destruction that ensued after the Trust attacked a conference Lecter was attending on earth. Will Graham was almost court-martialed for leading a rescue op against direct orders and later received a commendation for saving twenty people. The attending physician for Lecter at Cheyenne Mountain dialed them up after three days and begged Commander Du Maurier to recall both of them to Atlantis.   

Graham isn't here wearing a hole in the floor beside Lecter's bedside. No one is here, which is weird. Beverly radios her team again and asks for a sitrep, but there's no response back.

Dim light flickers underneath the door that leads to the basement. Funny, Beverly doesn't know if the infirmary had a basement before, but it must have, if someone is down there burning both ends of the candle. It's worth a shot.

The stairs are narrow and steep as she takes them one at a time, one hand on the rail. The hallway opens into a long laboratory, white tiled and bleached with overhead fluorescent light, the same laboratory Beverly ran when she worked with the Russian stargate program. Dr. Lecter is sitting at Beverly's personal workbench looking down into a microscope.

"Dr. Lecter," Beverly breathes. "We've been looking for you. I thought there was an emergency."

"There is," Lecter replies, his accent striking precisely on the consonants. "I've already notified Jack."

"Notified him about what?" Beverly asks a little irritably, in no small part because Lecter is dressed to the nines in checked navy blue, and Beverly is standing in front of him wearing her fucking Wonder Woman pyjamas.

"His chief medical officer has been butchered."

Beverly's stomach lurches. "What are you talking about?"

Hannibal's attention goes back to the microscope. "Come here if you please, Dr. Katz."

"No. I don't think so." The fluorescent lights flare white hot, and Beverly throws a hand over her face. A giant roving eye stares down at her like she's a specimen, like she's a thing. She's shrinking like Alice in Wonderland. Drink Me. _Eat Me._

A hand reaches for her, and she tries to run away, but her sockless feet are clunky in her boots. The other hand is holding a tall gleaming lance-like scalpel.

She's lifted with dizzying force, and underneath her Beverly can see microscope slides lined up like coffins, sterile and prepped for samples.

The clamps have her spread-eagled. She's on her back, and the scalpel descends on her as she struggles and screams. It slices, and it slices, and it _slices._

Hannibal is standing in front of her, skeletal in the beam of her flashlight. He cascades the stack of slides from one hand to the other like a magician, the glass tinkling like rain, and Beverly feels herself sever apart with them.


End file.
